I was always inspired by the Zen school of sumi-e, in which the goal was often how much character one could convey with very few strokes (and let the brain suggest the rest). The scene is in fact highly complex with lots of houses, structures, trees, hillside, ocean. I have painted those before and simply refused to repeat the clutter! That's why the pastel is so stylized. But the lines of the small vignette that I inked caught my eye as a classic S or Z composition and I simply eliminated everything else in view. BTW, it is inked over pencil draft with Kuretake miniature brush pen. The sumi-e look is not accidental.
